What is contemplative computing?

Contemplative computing may sound like an oxymoron, but it's really quite simple. It's about how to use information technologies and social media so they're not endlessly distracting and demanding, but instead help us be more mindful, focused and creative.

About Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

I write about people, technology, and the worlds they make.

My book on contemplative computing, The Distraction Addiction, was published by Little, Brown and Company in 2013. (It's been translated into Dutch (as Verslaafd aan afleiding) and Spanish (as Enamorados de la Distracción); Russian, Chinese and Korean translations are in the works.)

My next book, Rest: Why Working Less Gets More Done, is under contract with Basic Books. Until it's out, you can follow my thinking about deliberate rest, creativity, and productivity on the project Web site.

You damn kids get off my lawn, with your misinterpretations of neuroplasticity and media history!

I'm just getting around to Carl Wilkinson's recent Telegraph essay on writers "Shutting out a world of digital distraction." It's about how Zadie Smith, Nick Hornby and others deal with digital distraction, which for writers is particularly challenging. Successful writing requires a high degree of concentration over long periods, but the Internet can be quite useful for doing the sort of research that supports imaginative writing (not to mention serious nonfiction). Add in communicating with agents, getting messages from fans, and the temptation to check your Amazon rank, and you have a powerful device.

Unfortunately, the piece also has a couple paragraphs featuring that mix of technological determinism and neuroscience that I now regard as nearly inevitable. Editors seem to require having a section like this:

the internet is not just a distraction – it’s actually changing our brains, too. In his Pulitzer Prize-nominated book The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember (2010), Nicholas Carr highlighted the shift that is occurring from the calm, focused “linear mind” of the past to one that demands information in “short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts – the faster, the better”….

Our working lives are ever more dominated by computer screens, and thanks to the demanding, fragmentary and distracting nature of the internet, we are finding it harder to both focus at work and switch off afterwards.

“How can people not think this is changing your brain?” asks the neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University. “How can you seriously think that people who work like this are the same as people 20 or 30 years ago? Whether it’s better or worse is another issue, but clearly there is a sea change going on and one that we need to think about and evaluate.... I’m a baby boomer, not part of the digital-native generation, and even I find it harder to read a full news story now. These are trends that I find concerning.”

I don't want to argue, pace Stephen Poole, that this is merely neurobollocks (though I love that phrase), (Nor do i want to single out Baroness Greenfield, who's come in for lots of criticism for the ways she's tried to talk about these issues.)

All I want to argue is that 1-4 can be true, but that doesn't mean 5 must be true as well.

It's possible to believe that the world is changing quickly, that our brains seek to mirror these changes or adapt to them in ways that we're starting to understand (but have a long way to go before we completely comprehend), and lots of this change happens without our realizing it, before we're aware of it, and becomes self-reinforcing.

But-- and this is the important bit, so listen up-- we also have the ability of observe our minds, to retake control of the direction in which they develop, and to use neuroplasticity for our own ends.

Because we can observe our minds as work, we can draw on a very long tradition of practice in building attention and controlling our minds-- no matter what the world is doing. Yes, the great Jeff Hammerbacher line that "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" is absolutely true*, but when all is said and done, even Google hasn't taken away free will.

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"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" This quote is surely about banality and market forces, not distractibility as it is referencing:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz"
- excerpt from "HOWL"

Thanks for this. Fully and completely agree. These alarmists seem to deny our inherent flexibility and adaptability. We are entering a golden age of human capacity (not its decline).

You may be interested in a project I'm currently running called Beyond Literacy http://www.BeyondLiteracy.com It's a thought experiment about the demise of alphabetic literacy and the rise of other capabilities or capacities. I mention it because it intentionally pushes the boundaries on some status quo thinking.